Sandy: 5 political questions

The presidential campaigns are publicly hitting pause on East Coast electioneering as Hurricane Sandy spirals toward Atlantic beaches, but privately political professionals are starting to assess important questions about how it might affect next week’s elections up and down the ballot.

For obvious reasons — namely, that they don’t want to appear to make political hay out of a life-and-death act of nature — campaign officials won’t touch the prospective political aftermath of a storm that has yet to hit.

“Governor Romney’s concern is the safety and well-being of those in the path of this storm, not political considerations,” said Andrea Saul. Obama’s team wouldn’t talk about the ramifications on Sunday night.

But that doesn’t mean campaigns aren’t worried. Come hell or high water — and likely both — the nation will choose a president next Tuesday, and Sandy could wreak havoc on the election.

Here are the answers to five questions about Sandy’s impact on the election:

1) Will Mitt Romney’s momentum be stopped?

It’s hard to see how the storm helps. The Republican nominee has more than closed the gap with the incumbent over the final weeks of the campaign, taking a slim lead in most national polls. But his national boost hasn’t been mirrored in two pivotal states: Ohio and Virginia. Already Romney had to scrap a full day’s worth of events in Virginia Sunday.

Obama has had to change his schedule, too, but he’s not the one trying to make up ground.

And even though there are multiple schools of thought on how Sandy could affect voters’ feelings about the candidates or the nuts and bolts of getting folks to turn out, it’s still hard to see how the storm could help Romney. That is, unless the government botches the response and voters blame Obama.

There’s one practical problem: travel. The storm will make it difficult for Romney to make the final push in states affected by the storm including Virginia, Florida and New Hampshire. He does plan to visit Wisconsin, Iowa and Ohio Monday — also critical states. “Romney still has ground to make up in several swing states where the race has not budged,” one Democrat told POLITICO. “So to the degree it impacts travel — canceling trips to places like New Hampshire — makes it hard to make up the gap.”

2) Does Obama have a natural advantage because he’s president?

The short answer: yes. The longer answer: not if he makes an unforced error. While George W. Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina ranks among the worst blunders in modern presidential history, it has also ensured that no president or candidate will under-react to the threat of a devastating natural disaster.

As president, Obama’s best politics are to simply do his job well. On Sunday, he visited the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s headquarters for a briefing, which is pictured prominently on the White House website. The president, in suit and shirt with no tie, sits between FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate and Deputy Administrator Richard Serino.